Trends – Innovation – ITSM – IT Architecture – Requirement Analysis – Business views – Service Governance – Storage – Virtualization etc… What do I do, why do I do it, and why does everyone else do what they do? Time to reflect and this is my little pot where I share my view and others great contributions to this IT-world!

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This is really cool and something that I personally love! Great move by Microsoft!! 🙂

If you have any questions about this acquisition or if you need assistance with your mobile app development contact us at EnvokeIT!

Microsoft to acquire Xamarin and empower more developers to build apps on any device

As the role of mobile devices in people’s lives expands even further, mobile app developers have become a driving force for software innovation. At Microsoft, we are working to enable even greater developer opportunity and innovation by providing the best experiences to all developers, on any device, with powerful tools, an open platform and a global cloud.

As part of this commitment I am pleased to announce today that Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Xamarin, a leading platform provider for mobile app development.

In conjunction with Visual Studio, Xamarin provides a rich mobile development offering that enables developers to build mobile apps using C# and deliver fully native mobile app experiences to all major devices – including iOS, Android, and Windows. Xamarin’s approach enables developers to take advantage of the productivity and power of .NET to build mobile apps, and to use C# to write to the full set of native APIs and mobile capabilities provided by each device platform. This enables developers to easily share common app code across their iOS, Android and Windows apps while still delivering fully native experiences for each of the platforms. Xamarin’s unique solution has fueled amazing growth for more than four years.

Xamarin has more than 15,000 customers in 120 countries, including more than one hundred Fortune 500 companies – and more than 1.3 million unique developers have taken advantage of their offering. Top enterprises such as Alaska Airlines, Coca-Cola Bottling, Thermo Fisher, Honeywell and JetBlue use Xamarin, as do gaming companies like SuperGiant Games and Gummy Drop. Through Xamarin Test Cloud, all types of mobile developers—C#, Objective-C, Java and hybrid app builders —can also test and improve the quality of apps using thousands of cloud-hosted phones and devices. Xamarin was recently named one of the top startups that help run the Internet.

Thsi week Microsoft is going to roll out some new updates like Android Wrapping Tool and new features for iOS, Android and Windows Phone to Microsoft Intunes.

We are excited to share with you the next set of Intune features that will be released between May 19 and May 26. With our monthly release cadence, we continue to focus on providing you with best-in-class experiences that help keep your users productive while protecting your company’s sensitive data. You can expect to see the following new Intune standalone (cloud only) features in this release:

Microsoft has now released the Outlook app from Android, it’s no longer a preview.

There has been a lot of debate around this app and how it handles your credentials etc. but I must say that from a usability point of view it’s good!

One little fun thing that I saw is that they have missed how they spelled Dropbox in the “getting started intro” of the app… 🙂

Today we are excited to announce we have removed the preview label from Outlook for Android.

In January, we released Outlook for iOS and a preview of Outlook for Android. At the time, the iOS version of Outlook was ahead of the Android version in terms of features and performance. We set a high bar for where we wanted Outlook for Android to be before we removed the preview label. Since our preview release we’ve updated Outlook for Android 17 times—that’s more than one update per week—to meet this bar. A big part of that work has been improving the performance and stability of the app along with work on localization, accessibility and other fit and finish pieces. The other part of this work was about delivering features to add new value, match the iOS version and respond to your feedback.

Along with apps like Sway, the new Office universal apps for Windows 10, OneNote and others—Outlook is an example of Office’s new development model for building mobile apps—deliver a great first version of our apps and then iterate quickly with the help and feedback of our users. This removal from preview is not a change in that plan or a statement that we are ‘done.’ We will continue our pace of updates to make the app better each week in response your feedback.

In case you haven’t been using Outlook as your primary email app yet, here are some of the end user features we have delivered in the past three months:

Improved look and feel

We’ve continued to polish the look and feel of the app. We updated our icon sets and simplified our fonts to provide a more consistent Outlook experience across operating systems and devices. But it was also important for Outlook to feel like a natural part of Android. We use common Android design principles like the Navigation Drawer to house the multiple tools offered in the app and have common actions like settings available in the App Overflow menu.

This is a great blog post by Christopher Campbell and good picture to show the overall capabilities and architecture of the Citrix offering!

You’ve heard us talk about Mobile Workspaces and if you’re a techie you’re probably wondering if Citrix really has the architectural components (a complete, comprehensive and fully integrated architecture) that can deliver any app and data to any user on any device over any network?

Well let’s first identify a few of the market leading technologies that make up the Citrix Mobile Workspaces solution:

CloudPlatform orchestrates and provisions apps, desktops and IT services from any cloud

OK, OK. We know you have the products but do they really integrate?

Yes. Don’t believe me? Well as they say a picture is worth a thousand words. This is what the Mobile Workspace Architecture looks like.

OK. I get it. You have the architecture but that doesn’t necessarily translate to a seamless user experience.

Still don’t believe huh? Well this is what the user experience looks like.

XenMobile is a key ingredient in delivering a mobile workspace. Along with XenApp and XenDesktop it allows organizations to deliver on giving users access to any app from any device. In fact, if you’re an existing XenApp or XenDesktop customer, XenMobile seamlessly plugs into your existing architecture.

If you’re a XenDesktop or XenApp customer this is what your environment probably looks like.

Now this is what you need to enable EMM for BYO and COPE (Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled) devices and add that MDM, MAM, Secure Email, Secure Data…

Multi-factor authentication increases the security of user logins for cloud services above and beyond just a password. With Multi-Factor Authentication for Office 365, users are required to acknowledge a phone call, text message, or an app notification on their smartphone after correctly entering their password. Only after this second authentication factor has been satisfied can a user sign in.

Multi-factor authentication has been available for Office 365 administrative roles since June 2013, and today we’re extending this capability to any Office 365 user. We’re also enhancing the capabilities that have been available since June. We’re adding App Passwords for users so they can authenticate from Office desktop applications as these are not yet updated to enable multi-factor authentication. And we’re enabling users who are authenticated from a federated on-premises directory to be enabled for multi-factor authentication.

This addition of multi-factor authentication is part of our ongoing effort to enhance security for Office 365, and we’re already working on Office desktop application improvements to Multi-Factor Authentication for Office 365, which we’ll introduce later in this post. Office 365 offers many robust built-in security features for all customers and also optional controls that enable subscribers to customize their security preferences. More information about security in Office 365 is available inthe Office 365 Trust Center.

Let’s take a look at how Office 365 customers can take advantage of multi-factor authentication and configure it, including using App Passwords for Office desktop applications.

After entering your account password, you see a message like this while your phone is being called for acknowledgement.

This is really interesting! I’m not that surprised though, it was about time VMware did something!

I must agree with a lot of people who have written about this, they are really going for a leader! So they mean business! Will be fun to see how well the can integrate this into their offerings and how that will look like.

VMware buys AirWatch for $1.54 billion, acquires mobility strategy

VMware will acquire AirWatch, a mobile device management company, in a $1.17 billion cash deal that will give the virtualization software provider a play in mobility. VMware will also pay $365 million in installment payments and unvested stock options.

Mobile device management has been a hot sector desperately in need of consolidation given there are more than 100 vendors. Large enterprises increasingly want mobile device management put together with content management and collaboration. VMware’s acquisition follows IBM’s purchase of FiberLink and Citrix’s acquisition of Xenprise in 2013.

VMware’s spin is that AirWatch will give it a foothold in mobility as well as its end-user computing strategy, which revolves around desktop virtualization and delivering enterprise apps to tablets and smartphones.

Here’s Gartner’s Magic Quadrant on the sector.

According to VMware, AirWatch will continue to be led by CEO John Marshall. AirWatch will be lumped into VMware’s end-user computing group, which… continue reading here!

VMWare Announces Definitive Agreement to Acquire AirWatch

Acquisition will Provide Customers with the Most Complete Solution to Manage Users, Devices and Applications across Desktop and Mobile Environments.

PALO ALTO, Calif., January 22, 2014 – VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, and AirWatch today announced that they have signed a definitive agreement under which VMware will acquire AirWatch, the leading provider of enterprise mobile management and security solutions. VMware will acquire AirWatch for approximately $1.175B in cash and approximately $365M of installment payments and assumed unvested equity. The AirWatch team will continue to report to founder and chief executive officer John Marshall as part of VMware’s End-User Computing group, led by Sanjay Poonen, EVP and GM. Alan Dabbiere, AirWatch’s cofounder and chairman, will be overseeing a new AirWatch operating board which will report to Pat Gelsinger, VMware chief executive officer.

In this 3rd part of my 7 part series on XenMobile MDM 8.5 we will focus on policies. Policies within MDM allow you to control a multitude of features on your end users mobile devices, including: WiFi, Email, VPN, Location Services, most all functionality of the device (camera, FaceTime, etc), AppStore access, etc. Most configuration variations you do to control and limit/restrict/configure your end users devices will be done from this tab. This tab is also the location where we can create some automated actions that include notifying your users when they have fallen out of compliance.

If you would like to read the other parts in this article series please go to:

In this article I was to cover a “base” set of policy configurations that will give you a feel of how the policies work in general. By no means does this cover the breadth of what you can do with MDM, but it at least gives you a glimpse.

I want to accomplish the following in this article:

Set a passcode policy on the device

Block iCloud from syncing documents

Preconfigure a WiFi network on my device (so that your users could come into the office with WiFi already configured and never have been given the password)

Blacklist Dropbox, Box, and SkyDrive applications

Notify the user their device as Out of Compliance (OoC) if those apps are installed

Mark the device as OoC in the dashboard

Later in this series we will build upon the policies by adding applications to push to our users and ultimately roll it all together in a Deployment. For the purposes of this article (and the fact I’m a die hard Apple fan) the only devices I own are Apple..so this will all be iOS based. If your Android, first off I’m sorry, and second off it should still be similar .

Configure a Passcode Policy

Step 2. Navigate to the “Policies” tab, then iOS->Configuration. You should have two policies that were installed by default with the console, one of them being a Passcode policy. Highlight it and click “Edit”